Salma Hayek, like many sexy, beautiful women, has not always been taken seriously. I mean, how can you be sexy, show off your cleavage AND have something intelligent to say, or, make astute business decisions?

Salma Hayek Credit: FilmMagic

Not that she’s let this stop her. At all. Today, at 51 (!!!) she is as drop-dead as she was 30 years ago, more outspoken and irreverent, and yes, still smart.

Career Moves

Let’s look at her resume – remember when she totally held her own opposite Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock (thanks to the brilliant Tina Fey)? By the way, that pairing was such a hit that the two are starring in a movie together called Drunk Parents.

Who remembers that she produced and starred in Frida, which won TWO OSCARS! And, that her production company Ventanarosa brought Ugly Betty to America.

She is regularly listed on Hollywood’s Power Women roster and one of Hollywoods biggest ball breakers, Harvey Weinstein called her a “ball breaker“.

Feminist Blur

We could take a page from her stance on sexism and it’s evil twin ageism. “We are the generation that said, ‘We’re not going away at 30,’” she said to uproarious applause as she received an award for her charity work, and laid some harsh truth on Hollywood. “They cannot ignore us anymore.”

It might seem trivial, but, Salma’s (among other’s) popping up in #nomakeup selfies have a role. For one, hello??? um, I’m pretty excited to see a 51 year old woman look like this. Secondly, after 40, women tend to go either one of two ways – ‘what the hell, I give up’ and stop caring, or ‘botox and full make-up all the time’ to hide the effects of aging. We need to show more of our real faces, everyday faces. We don’t need to be perfect. We do need to be seen. (Trust me, I realize most of us don’t look like Salma Hayek, but still. And, PS a lot of you look amazing.)

But, there’s one area that’s hard to completely get a grasp on with Salma: feminism. First she said she isn’t one, (what??) then, thankfully, she turned it around and she now says she is, “I am a feminist because I love women and I am ready to fight for women. I am a feminist because I am proud to be a woman, and I am passionate about making the world a better place for women. I am a feminist because a lot of amazing women have made me the woman I am today. I am inspired by women every day, as friends and as colleagues.”

Yet, earlier this year she had some very uncomfortable challenges for former Daily Show bad-ass Jessica Williams’ point of view at a women in hollywood roundtable (read about it here), that comes across as naive and privileged. Salma comes from privilege. An affluent upbringing, a million dollar paycheque, a billionaire husband. She exists in the 1%.

In other words, despite the trappings of a perfect life, she’s not perfect.

The important lesson here is that it hasn’t stopped her, and it needn’t be a roadblock to gleaning inspiration. Too often women wait until some BS version of perfection has been attained before we are willing to use our voices. Our plan is that once we have it completely figured out, polished and practiced, then we’ll step out. It’s a losing game. It’s been shown time and again in the workplace and in life, we fear judgment, being ostracized, looking stupid.

This is a result of centuries of inequality and disenfranchisement, NOT, because women are weak or incapable. It’s a deeply ingrained habit. But, a habit that will only change as we exercise our willingness to choose using our voice over waiting on misguided perfection. And, its important we cheer each other on, and, chill out if a woman says or does something that isn’t perfect.

Happy Birthday, Salma. You make 51 look good, and not just because you’re hot.

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Leaving a big city in your prime dating years, peace-ing out on a career, family and friends to live alone on a farm would seem a terrible way to find love. But, love is funny that way. When you’re in the right place, it finds you.

by Brenda Hsueh

Iwas no spring chicken at 33 when I went to Everdale, an organic teaching farm, as a long-term volunteer in 2008, wanting to learn about organic farming. There I proved I was not just up to the task physically, but loved it. In late fall, I went shopping for farms. By Christmas, my offer on a piece of land had been accepted and I was moved in by March of 2009. In spring, ground was broken on my first vegetable field, and Black Sheep Farm was born.

The first year out here, I learned that my road was actually a busy one, good for a roadside stand. Unlike my condo in the city, ‘town’ is an hour’s round trip away. Since then, I’ve learned to wire in a new pressure for my well switch in -20C, and then to run a heat lamp out to the pump house to defrost the now frozen pressure tank.

And, there’ve been other, harder lessons. In 2012 a drought killed all my winter squash and zucchini, about 20% of my vegetable field. I learned first hand that soils depleted of organic matter don’t retain water.

farm baby

This year, 2017, is my ninth growing season at Black Sheep Farm, and my most challenging. Why? My daughter Emma was born on May 5. I’m a new mom, with all that implies, lack of sleep, torturous breast feeding in the beginning, and the isolation of spending most of the day home with an infant. It also meant I needed help to run the farm, so I hired a full-time employee , Michelle, and we’ve been managing a vegetable garden in the wettest and coolest year since I moved out here.

“We were lucky, with a healthy pregnancy, birthing and baby, all despite the odds, though I’d like to credit my strong farming body with the results.”

In my pre-farming life, I worked an office job in the financial sector in downtown Toronto, living in a condo, trying out new restaurants, and generally living the city life. But I cared deeply about the environment, social justice, and food, so when the 2007 financial crisis hit, it was a wakeup call for me to find meaning in what I do.

I learned that our global food system is broken, exploiting people’s labour and health and destroying the environment with pesticides. I wanted to be part of a better way.

That’s now what I do, I farm using agroecological principles that improve soil life, producing food in a manner that improves the environment, maximizing diversity and resilience. My goal isn’t to grow the biggest vegetables or the most pounds per acre, but to produce food at a rate that the land can support, and that can support me financially. The farm produces vegetables for its CSA (community supported agriculture) members, as well as meat and fibre from a growing flock of sheep.

Leaving Home to Find It

I was single all my years in Toronto, and was still single when I moved to the farm. I certainly didn’t expect to find anyone out here in the middle of nowhere, with a population density a fraction of Toronto’s, and mostly over 50 years old. However, I became good friends with the family next door, and started dating the oldest son in 2012. We’ve been together ever since.

All those years of wondering why I couldn’t meet anyone compatible in Toronto, it turns out I was just in the wrong place. I needed to be where I was meant to be, doing what I loved, so love could find me.

Having my daughter wasn’t a given either.

Being a first-time mom at 42 meant a ‘geriatric’ pregnancy, with all the fearsome statistics and added testing and protocols to do with my ‘advanced maternal age’. We were lucky, with a healthy pregnancy, birthing and baby, all despite the odds, though I’d like to credit my strong farming body with the results.

I’m definitely healthier and stronger now in my 40’s than when working office jobs in my 20’s. I look forward to sharing this active farm lifestyle with my daughter as she grows.

calm in the chaos

Brenda Hseuh, Black Sheep Farm

At this point, it’s almost halfway through the 2017 farming season, and despite its challenges, I’m quite calm. Maybe having a new person to take care of contributes to that. After all, when Mother Nature throws another torrential rainfall at you, flooding your field yet again, now you have a child to cuddle while waiting out the storm. Next year will have its own share of farming and family challenges, and the next year, and the next.

As I strive to build a resilient farm environment, I become more resilient myself, able to problem solve and work with the circumstances I’ve been given. At the end of the day, I produce something very concrete, food, a necessity for all human life, and I do so in a way I can be proud of and believe in.

It used to be that everyone was a farmer, and now it seems no one is. I hope that changes as more people choose to join me in such an honourable endeavour.

Brenda Hsueh is an organic vegetable farmer, mother, and owner of Black Sheep Farm in Grey County, south western Ontario. She lives on 40 acres with her partner, her baby and the occasional black sheep.

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Women may be our best hope for the future of healthy, sustainable, local food.

By Frances MacKinnon

It’s a familiar scene every Saturday morning in cities and towns. Streams of urbanites strolling parking lots and parks, stuffing eco-friendly bags with fresh organic produce from local farms.

There is a very good chance that that food was grown (and harvested and loaded into a truck) by a woman. They’ve been there all along, but, somehow we’ve overlooked this fact.

While the farming sector as a whole (and by extension, our domestic food system) is in a worrying state of decline, with no sign of interest from the next generation, the organic farming sector is growing like a weed, and, women are at the root of it.

Wendee Kubik, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario has been studying women farmers for more than 20 years.

“The number of family farms is decreasing, and, there is not a lot of people going into farming in general . But, of the people going into it, the largest area of growth is women in organic farming.”

Organic farming makes up less than 5% of overall agriculture in Canada, but, from 2013-2015 it saw a jump of $1 billion in sales, and, and it’s not slowing down. COTA (Canadian Organic Trade Association) reports that more than half of Canadians buy organic on a weekly basis, and 80% “have maintained or increased their organic purchases in the last year.”

Kubik is quick to point out that women have been farming – doing virtually the same work as men, in addition to innumerable support and family-raising roles – since forever. But, they were what she calls “invisible farmers”, unacknowledged because they were women, or, not identified because census data only allowed for one farmer per household. In fact, Kubik argues, it is on the backs of such traditionally undervalued female farmers that we have enjoyed agricultural bounty and lower food prices for decades.

But, in this new era of farming, borne out of necessity and changing attitudes, more females are finding a fit on the farm.

WOMEN’S WORK

“I know more women than men organic farmers,” says Ann van Der Heyden who started Wooler Dale Farm with her late husband 35 years ago.

GETTING CLOSER TO YOUR FOOD

Urbanites, women and men, are indeed trading the city vibe for the rural route. Couples, families and singles are seeking a healthier, more fulfilling, sometimes more affordable, lifestyle. “I know several that have left stressful jobs in Toronto and did a complete turnaround and started an organic farm.”

Today, Ann with her daughter and farming partner Nicole Prins are slinging eye-popping fresh vegetables and the occasional cooking tip as fast as they can to a steady line up of health conscious urban customers at Wychwood Barns Farmers Market in Toronto.

Their farm is a two-hour trek away from their city customers; their day begins at the crack of dawn, and ends late afternoon with a tear down of their stand, and another two-hour drive.. It’s an exhausting end to an exhausting week. “Market isn’t all just fun,” says Nicole. “You’re working so hard all week, and then on the last day of the week you make your income. It’s rewarding, but, it’s hard work.” Nicole has a bachelors degree in chemistry and math could be a poster-child for eating organic.

She’s a rare second generation farmer planning to take over what her parents started. But, it comes with a cost. A year ago she had her first child, Ava. “There is no maternity leave when you’re running a business. When you’re pregnant, or post-pregnancy, there is no time off.” Which means Ava is part of the farm chores. “Sometimes I bring her with me and she sleeps while I grade peas.”

Single women shouldering the entire responsibility of running a farm is an even smaller percentage of the whole farming picture, but those numbers are creeping up, too.

Brenda Hsueh, Black Sheep Farm Credit:Brenda Hsueh

In 2007, Brenda Hsueh was living the dream of most young career women. A Bay St. job, a downtown Toronto condo, city life, the whole nine.

But, the version of success which she’d worked her whole life towards left her longing for a deeper purpose and meaning in life. At 33, she left it all behind, and bought a farm in Grey County, Ontario. She’s found her home. “I’ll be here until I die,” she promises.

“It was a moral decision. I look at the world and how we treat it and I’m horrified. I grew up a suburban kid who stayed inside all summer reading books and playing piano. But, I love the physical work of farming.”

A CHANGING FIELD

In case your perception of farming only includes the outdated image of a weathered, middle-age man driving a tractor and throwing bales of hay, you’d be wrong on a few levels.

For starters, on many farms, 75-80% of volunteers and interns these days are women. Sometimes even more. “And, they’re the hardest workers,” a (male) farmer recently piped up while I was chatting up his neighbour.

Add to that the fact that 90% of farming is large scale factory farms, and even if you shop at a grocer that sells ‘locally sourced’ products, you’re still likely buying from a mass producing farm. (*Ontario does not enforce regulations for products labeled organic. Several other provinces, do.)

“A picture of a farmer with an arm around a cow gives the sense of relationship with the animals. That’s the Ontario brand. It’s false.” In other words you’re buying what the marketers are selling, and this makes Angie Koch crazy. “It’s insulting to my sense of integrity”

If there is a rockstar in the world of organic farming, it might be Angie Koch.

Angie is 42 and sole manager of Fertile Grounds Farm just outside Waterloo, Ontario. It’s a two-hour drive and a world away from the Toronto skyline.

Angie is talking on the phone with me while eating her lunch, one ear on the walkie for any possible emergencies.

She’s already been in the field six hours. It’s full throttle harvest time and her 250 customers are expecting their boxes of produce to be ready for pick up.

“I’m a slave to the vegetables.”

The fact that she is going stronger than ever after 10 years of back breaking, isolating and near-burn out farming is to her, a miracle. “My body won’t do this forever. Thats the flip side of 42. I have chronic back problems, I have arthritis. It’s not what it was 10 years ago. Market gardening is extremely labour intensive work. ”

As far as being a female in the farming world, there are unique challenges.

“Women on the whole are not brought up to be mechanically minded. Most daughters are not taught how to fix a pipe when its broken, or change a tire. As far as we’ve come its still the case that women aren’t mechanically minded. A lot of things break on a farm.”

Fortunately, she is not alone.

“I have staff and interns and they’re mostly women from non-farming backgrounds. You go to craft field day at a farm and it’s 75% women interning.”

Exactly why women seem attracted to organic farming is up for debate.

“Is it community connections?,” she wonders out loud. “Small scale diversified farming is emebedded in relationships. Women are still more the ones who do the cooking and food tasks -is there more passion in what type of food we’re putting into our children’s bodies? All I can guess is there is a care-taking mindset to do things in a thoughtful, respectful way.”

In speaking with a handful of women farmers at the market, one leaves me with this thought:

“You’ll find most female farmers are feminists.”

Wendee Kubik says research has shown that stress on female farmers is great, and historically, there has been little support for their unique issues. “They do a lot of community work to keep community going. Some women do farm work, child work, household work and a ‘real’ job off the farm.

Her advice, if you farm, call yourself a farmer. Push for policy changes that benefit women. Join associations. “If you’re invisible nothing is going to happen.”

“The numbers are very small right now, but this is the wave of the future.”

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This difficult question has presented itself to me before I’m half-way through my first coffee. I’m standing in my socks, staring at a wall of sharpie-covered sticky note chaos in my office. It’s an early winter morning. I’m mentally willing the pastel cloud of research staring back at me to organize itself.

Language That Empowers

I’ve spent years investigating the topic of women turning forty from every possible angle. The notes are sorted into colour-coded categories that I’ve been digging into on the topic of women in their forties – Neurology, Biology, Psychology, Sociology – with dozens of sub-headings mixed in. It had become a point of practicality. I needed a shorthand to describe what I was doing.

I took a sip of coffee, looked at all the headings, and mumbled, “Fortyology.”

The Fear Whisper

Without exception, whenever the topic of my research came up, any woman over 35 and within earshot perked up, looked me straight in the eyes, and whisper-pleaded with me to publish my book before their fortieth birthday.

Turning forty was obviously on their minds, and despite a life that looked really good on Instagram, they were having a small (or in my case, large) freak-out. At the very least, they had some legitimate questions about life after forty.

Perhaps, it is because this is a truly complex time of life for women. It’s a time when we
are so much to so many in our lives, yet struggle with our own identity. Many women in their late 30s and early 40s feel profoundly unfulfilled, or disillusioned with the life they’ve built, irrespective of what it looks like on the outside.

It’s no wonder we lack a meaningful language to talk about this stage of life. Our words are borrowed from our younger selves, and more often from the media messages that we willingly and unwillingly absorb, and have for our entire lives.

The Age Gap

There is no lack of bite-size reading material on the subject of turning forty. Most of it social media clickbait, full of tired, patronizing advice, or lists of 40 Things To Do In Your 40s! Or, the truly gag-inducing Forty Is The New Twenty genre.

But, what I have found, despite research chops honed in national newsrooms, hundreds of conversations with scientists, psychologists, women (and men) of all ages and countless magazine articles and research papers is this:a common language to describe the era of your forties does not exist.

In fact, serious study of women between the ages of 36-50 is hard to come by. For decades, if not millennia, women in this age bracket have been dismissed as less than noteworthy in scientific terms, except for very specific exceptions, such as fertility.

But, finally there are signs of change in that gross overgeneralization.Research in the fields of biology, psychology, neurology, is opening new conversations and revealing valuable data.

To Have A Voice, You Need A Language

Which brings me to the name of our new language, and blog – Fortyology.

Forty, refers to the age bracket between 40-49, and ‘ology’ is the study of.

Yep, that’s me. World’s first Fortyologist.

Fortyology is the umbrella under which we will explore data, stories, sage advice and culture of being forty(ish) in a Boomer – Millennial world.

I’ve spent several years researching Fortyology from a place of passion, science journalism, self-interest andabove all, the desire to share this with you. It’s no coincidence that I’ve also been embedded in the world of my forties and have learned much from my own experiences, research and wisdom from those who have come before.

I can’t wait to share this language and the world of Fortyology with you, and for all of us to expand our vocabulary.

Leave a comment, or send an email to share your thoughts on the language of forty.

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Fortyology Founder and Editor, Frances MacKinnon is an accomplished journalist, writer, speaker, filmmaker and branded content expert, committed to shining a light on women 35+. You'll find stories from and about inspirational women, advice from experts, and a community of positivity, possibly mixed with irony. The best part is hearing from you.